Religion Dispatches
…nsated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it, and the economic well-being of everyday people has parted company for good. Political life: Here the rapi…
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…, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution—the number specified in order for the Constitution to be in full and binding effect for all 13 former colonies. Those who prefer a winter birthday might want to go for Dec. 15, 1791, the date on which the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the Bill of Rights. (I know: much too close to Christmas, doesn’t have a chance.) This “birthday” business matters because pe…
Read More…Moore and other conference leaders appeared to be caught off guard by the number of LGBT Christians and supportive Christian advocates, some Baptists, who not only attended the entire conference, but also respectfully and publicly responded to Moore’s call to kindness and understanding and offered to meet with conference leaders at the venue. Although there were evidently no face-to-face meetings with Moore, about a dozen LGBT Christians and LGBT…
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…that Luca Volontè, an Italian anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ activist with close ties to American Religious Right figures “is under investigation for allegedly accepting millions in exchange for helping muzzle Europe’s top human rights body.” Volontè, who heads the Novae Terrae Foundation, has been accused by prosecutors of taking money from the government of Azerbaijan in return for helping to defeat a European human rights resolution that would h…
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…nothing about a movement, nothing about a trend. But all that context was lost as the fragement of fact was taken to be evidence of the growing acceptance of the morality of killing small children. “People thought a new effort was underway to legalize infanticide,” Saletan writes. “This is how the echo chamber works.” It’s not just the echo chamber of ideologically aligned media, though. And it’s not just social media. The propensity to believe a…
Read More…ound one-quarter of the electorate ever since 2000. According to Pew, that number will be a bit lower this time around: about 20%, by their estimate. White evangelicals are losing ground to non-white voters just like all whites, and to the religiously unaffiliated, just like all Christians. Those unaffiliated voters—the “Nones”—now rival white evangelicals in size. About two-thirds of them support Hillary Clinton, making them a solid Democratic co…
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…erve certain neoliberal, conservative, or nationalist agendas, there are a number of commitments that many of them claim to embrace. These include commitments to the following: religious and cultural pluralism, gender equity, racial and sexual diversity, environmental sustainability, scientific inquiry and historical-critical commentary, and a public space that guarantees both freedom of and from religion. Hence, I am certain the number of self-pr…
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…he violent images weren’t necessary. The rapes could have happened behind closed doors; or with Lisbeth’s clothes on; or the camera could have been kept on her face rather than on her lifted backside. To communicate the terror of the rape scenes all you need is a good actor, and the director surely had confidence in Rooney Mara, whom he’d worked with a year earlier on The Social Network. Every frame, every camera angle, every scene in a feature fi…
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…control from the Vatican II proceedings, which were already dealing with a number of controversial doctrinal issues, and had no real intention of changing the policy on birth control. Originally there were no lay members on the commission, but when they were added they were all married Catholic couples drawn from conservative Catholic family organizations who could be expected to mirror the hierarchy’s position on contraception. The commission stu…
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…such special interest groups as AIPAC. This speech may have cost him large numbers of these smaller, progressive donors without gaining him much from the small numbers of larger, more conservative donors. Indeed, there may not be a single policy issue where Obama’s liberal base differs from the candidate more than on Israel/Palestine. Not surprisingly, the Green Party and its likely nominee, former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, along wit…
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